Research Links

These are a few links that have caught my imagination:

AI Research (heavily influenced by a couple of folks at MIT, if
you can imagine)

Rodney
Brooks' work, including the subsumption architecture, struck some
people as revolutionary way back when Brooks was still making robot
bugs. He's making an android the last I heard, but his work is still
worth reading up on. In particular, read "A Robust Layered Control
System for a Mobile Robot"

Pattie
Maes' work builds on Brooks' subsumption architecture, to some
degree. My Bachelors thesis was written under Pattie's
supervision. Amongst all she's done, the paper that I suggest reading
is "How
To Do the Right Thing". This paper describes an "activation net"
of competency modules. The notion is that different modules inhibit or
encourage other modules to activate to satisfy predecessor or
exclusion relationships between activities. No, it's not a neural net.

Bruce Blumberg is
heading the Synthetic Characters group at the MIT Media Lab. He began
studying under Pattie shortly after I did, and he has carried on the
torch of situated artificial life intelligence. He and his group have
a bunch of fun papers here.

Physics

Advanced
Character Physics by Thomas Jakobsen. This page describes an
approach to physics that doesn't require solving the equations of
motion for a 3-d body, and yet still yields believable results with
quite acceptable speed. For what it's worth, I showed this stuff to Matt Scott, who then won
a PS2 contest making a marionette that ran in the VU using this
approach.

Terrain

Binary
Triangle Trees, as seen in Tread Marks, this page
describes an inexpensive way for terrain to be represented so that you
can do continuous level of detail (CLoD) on dynamic terrain.